Yugoslavia meets Silicon Valley in post-apocalyptic video game

The video game Golf Club Wasteland imagines an alternative future for the Earth where, following a devastating ecological catastrophe, the ultra-rich move to Tesla City on Mars and only visit Earth to play golf amidst the ruins. Everyone else is dead.

Developed by Serbian independent creative agency Demagog Studio in 2019, the computer game takes a lone player, wearing a cosmonaut suit and carrying a golf stick, across glass high rises with pink neon signs, referencing memes by Donald Trump, a destroyed Eiffel Tower, the emblematic Yugoslav-era spomeniks, and… an imagined monument to Elon Musk, designed after existing Karl Marx statues.

The choice of architecture is deliberate. “In order to create urban environments that symbolise faith in progress, we placed the spomeniks in dialogue with today’s Big Tech narrative,” Igor Simic, the mastermind behind the game, told The Calvert Journal. “In this way, Silicon Valley and Yugoslavia meld into one weird ‘neverland’ — a soon to be ‘wasteland’, due to climate change,” he added.

Previously available on Apple from 4 September, the game is also launching on Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Xbox, Sony Playstation, and PC in collaboration with Polish gaming publisher Untold Tales.